And Chapter 5 is here. I apologize in advance for the snippets of stereotypical Wufei-ism, but the opportunities were just too good to pass up. Thank you so much for all the reviews; it's nice to be writing something that's funny and is making people laugh (and I'm really enjoying writing this!). Anyway, so here's Chapter 5, see you in a week!
Mutually Assured Destruction
Chapter Five – An Unconventional Attack
Tynan
- - - - -
"We'll go to prison."
"Only if they catch us."
"And you think they won't figure out it was us, Hilde?"
"Okay, scratch that, what about the first plan?"
"Five to ten years."
". . . Do we have any plans that don't result in us going to jail?"
"Hilde, we're going about this the wrong way."
"How do you figure?"
"We need to get them where they cannot escape."
"You mean lock them up naked again?"
"I mean, that we need to put them in a situation that despite all their training and all their skill, they simply cannot get out of."
- - - - -
It was almost 10:30 when Heero finally made it to his office. Relena had taken over an hour in the bathroom and even after that he could distinctly see her feet were still dark blue under the pants, stockings, and very conservative shoes she chose to try and hide it. The drive to her office had been completely soundless; and she shunned the usual escort into the building he should have provided, instead finding a nearby security officer. Heero couldn't help but smile to himself as she threw her silent hissy fit.
He made his way down the hall and stopped in front of his office door while he dug his keys out but discovered it was already unlocked. Suspicion immediately gripped him. He had only left Relena about 20 minutes ago, there was no way she could have set up anything already. Still, it was better to be on the safe side; he stepped off the side of the door and pushed it open with his foot.
Nothing happened.
Cautiously he tilted his head around the side and was met with –
"Hey buddy, what the hell took you so long?"
Heero felt his shoulders drop as he crossed the threshold into his office, "How did you get in here?"
His friend held something that looked like it may have once been a paper clip and a small pocket knife, Heero rolled his eyes but Duo just grinned, "Hey everyone's got a talent right?"
"Why are you here?"
"Well duh! To show you the results of our little endeavors last night! Geez, for being so brilliant you're pretty thick." It was just then that Heero noticed the laptop Duo had propped on his desk. Duo turned the device around and revealed it to be playing a video of Hilde stumbling out of hers and Duo's bedroom only to be assaulted with several cans of what looked like silly string. For a moment she just stood there before lunging for the camera and the screen went black.
Duo was doubled over laughing again, "Oh man, I am never going to get tired of see that . . ."
"They'll be coming after us again. We'll need to be on our guard."
"Heero, come on we're talking about the pacifist princess and my girlfriend both of whom are madly in love with the two men in this room." He reclined in his chair, "Besides, now that we know to keep an eye out for them, what do you really think that they're going to be able to get one over on us?"
- - - - -
"You actually pulled it off?!"
"It wasn't that hard really . . . the papers were just sitting right out there for anyone who happened to walk by."
"So when's it going to be?"
"Tomorrow, well that's probably when they'll find out anyway."
"Wow Relena, I gotta say I'm impressed, I didn't think you had something this malicious in you."
"Yes well, I think it must have seeped into my blood stream with all that blue dye still staining my feet."
- - - - -
Heero glanced around the loud and semi-crowded room in a suspicious manner; yes the likelihood of something happening in the Preventers HQ cafeteria was slim, but still one had to be on their guard. Especially when it had been 24 hours and there had been no retaliation from the girls. Duo chalked this up to their surrender, but Heero was not so willing to accept that . . . Relena had been pretty pissed off.
Across the table Wufei was eyeing him curious while simultaneously trying to ignore the ranting of the braided man who sat beside him. Yuy seemed on edge; while some degree of paranoia was to be expected as part of his usual demeanor something seemed . . . off. The thought was suddenly pushed out of his mind as Duo's hand clamped around his shoulder.
"I'm telling ya man, you should have seen it. Well, actually I have the video, swing by my office I'll –"
"Maxwell, what makes you think that I'm even remotely interested in watching of video of you accosting your girlfriend with various colored and food substances?"
Duo looked borderline insulted, "Hey do you have any idea how long that took me to set up? I'm keeping that video forever, we'll show it to the kids one day and tell them that this is how Mommy –"
"Ah, Agents Yuy and Maxwell."
The two men looked up from their sandwiches to see their fearless leader, the Commander of the Preventers Bureau, one Lady Une gazing back at them . . . and smiling.
As if this wasn't unsettling enough she took the seat next to Heero, setting down her own lunch which was wrapped to go. "Just the men I was looking to see, if you don't mind I'll just join you for a moment so we can go over this evening's plans. I'll have the actual schedules e-mailed to you once I get back to my office. I must say that I was pleasantly surprised to see the two of you are starting to take a more active interest in the . . ."
She kept talking but Duo and Heero had stopped listening in order to exchange confused glances. After shrugging to one another Heero finally turned to the woman beside him and in as cautious a voice as he could muster asked, "Commander, what are you talking about?"
Une stopped abruptly and looked back and forth between her agents, "Well the Open House and Registration Day at the Academy tonight, of course. The both of you signed up for yesterday."
Duo felt the blood drain from his face and slowly he turned to meet Heero's eyes which looked as though they might shoot death rays at him at any moment. He glanced back towards Une, "Um Commander, we didn't . . . well, I don't think – "
"You don't think what Maxwell?" her tone had suddenly switched back to the more threatening one he knew so well.
Duo shifted in his seat a bit, "Well you see, umm Heero and me, we didn't actually sign up for –"
"Are you telling me, Agent Maxwell, that both you and Agent Yuy are suddenly unwilling to carry out a task that you already designated for yourselves?"
Duo felt himself beginning to break under her glare; across the table Heero was still trying to kill him with his eyes, next to him Wufei was snickering a bit. "N-no ma'am."
"Excellent, well then I'll see both of you at 2:30 for set up." She stood and picked up the box containing her lunch. "I had asked that everyone register in teams of three, but I suppose we'll just have to find someone else to join –" she stopped dead and her eyes came to rest on Wufei, "Actually, Agent Chang, you're not scheduled for anything important tomorrow. Why don't you be Agent Yuy and Maxwell's third man?"
Wufei sat bolt upright in his chair, a frantic look on his face, "Commander, I can't –"
"I'll see the three of you in a few hours then." And with that she spun on her heels and marched towards the door.
If looks could kill there wouldn't be enough left of Duo to bury.
- - - -
"So what do you find you get out of be a Preventer?"
"Long hours and people shooting at you."
The girl looked slightly take a back to Heero's annoyance did not get up and leave the way the last one did. At the table next to him Wufei didn't seem to be fairing as well either.
"And what exactly do you do within the agency?" It was hard to tell if the young man seated across from him was actually not afraid or just plain stupid.
"I work in Special Operations, all other information is classified Level 7 clearance."
He nodded in return, "Yes you said that already, so what can you tell me?"
Wufei leveled his eyes with the man, noting that his name tag read 'Todd', "I can tell you that this job is not for the lazy. Stupid they can work with; they can scare the stupid out of you. But lazy, that runs deep."
Todd looked almost insulted, "And what makes you think that I'm lazy?"
"You're wearing two different socks, you haven't shaved in at lease a week, and according to your resume you haven't been employed in over a year and a half." Wufei held the piece of paper up for the young man to see though he wasn't entirely convinced that he could actually read it.
He rolled his eyes as the young man got up and walked away. Behind him he could hear Duo ranting to a young woman of about 20 who had had the misfortune to sit down and talk with him.
"And then there was this other mission, man I really thought that we were all going die that time. I mean, you should have seen the size of this bomb; I've never seen that much C-4 in one place. So anyway, me and Heero and like ten other guys, we're standing there looking at this thing and checking the room for the gunmen when all of a sudden we hear the door slam shut behind us and the bomb lights up with one of those little timer thingies and starts counting down –"
"Um, sir?" She interrupted quietly.
". . . and as soon as it does, like twenty guys show up out of nowhere and start shooting at us. They had to have like an AK-47 or and Uzi or something, cause you should have seen the size of the hole it left in the wall right next to my head –"
"Agent Maxwell, sir?"
"Yeah, what's up?"
"I, umm, I'm only have a degree in computer engineering . . . I wasn't really looking for any field work, just a desk job."
Duo sat up from his reclined position, "Well yeah, but no matter what you do here you've got to go through the academy and learn all the standard stuff. When you come out you'll be an Officer Third-Class then if you want to move up at all you've got to do some field work."
The girl paled a bit, "Oh . . . well is there any thing like that I could do that doesn't involved C-4?"
Wufei rolled his eyes as the conversation continued and the girl eventually got up and left, Duo smiling and waving at her back. Wufei stood from his seat and picked up the woman's file from the table, flipped it open, and began reading. "Maxwell, you let her go?! She's probably the only competent one we've had in over an hour!"
Duo shrugged at him, "Hey man, she said she wasn't sure she'd survive the academy!"
"That doesn't matter!" He tossed the file back on the desk, "We don't have to give a damn what happens to them after today. Une's only instructions were that we had to find three potentially capable people each and run them through the evaluation course before we could leave!"
Wufei suppressed the urge to throttle Duo, "I swear to God Maxwell, I could kill you right now; I could be in my office doing actual work if it wasn't for you and Yuy's little spat with your girlfriends!"
"Okay first of all, Relena's not Heero's girlfriend. Second, this is not a spat, this is war! Nobody is going to make me sit and interview people all day and get away with it."
On the other side of the table Heero stood and walked away in the direction of the course, the woman he had been interviewing in tow. He slowed his pace a little so that she could keep up with him; which for some reason only served to irritate him more.
The cake had been one thing, it was not actually directed at him and while it probably could have been overlooked he had to make his point. He was willing to accept that the being-left-naked-in-a-locker-room-for-over-an-hour was at least partially his fault; he shouldn't have underestimated Relena's desire for revenge. This, however was where he drew the line. Forcing him to spend hours interviewing people who thought that having a pulse and evidence of brain activity qualified them for the Academy was neither practical nor a joke as far as he was concerned.
Again, he had underestimated Relena, or rather he hadn't correctly estimated her. She was getting smart about this, thinking about her opponent, learning to hit him where it would hurt the most and most of that was probably his fault for teaching her to think like this. He never had been sure if Relena was paying attention to all the things he had tried to teach her over the past two or so years; it was now obvious that she had and then some. He had created a monster. Regardless, she was still the student and he was a master of pulling off the impossible.
- - - - -
Relena threw her head back and laughed as she flipped through the pictures in front of her. "Oh Hilde, I can't believe you actually went there and took these. I'm so sorry that I missed it."
Her friend grinned, "It was priceless really, you should have seen Heero. I think he scared away almost every person that came near their table."
"And they didn't see you?"
"Relena, come on. Do you really think that they'd let me get away with a camera full of pictures of them wearing big buttons on their shirts that say 'Preventer's Open Recruitment Day: I'm hear to answer your questions'?"
Relena laughed again but then turned to Hilde to look her straight in the eye, "They're going to kill us for this you know."
- - - - -
"Well, let's see here, first we had the guy who on the driving portion you totaled every car but the one he was driving. The lady who, on the pistol range, refused to use a gun. And, oh, ha, here's my favorite, the one who on the written portion only doodled all over his test papers."
"Don't forget the woman who started crying when I asked what her age and weight were."
"Yeah, they got us huh?"
"So what are we going to do about it?"
"Huh? What do you mean we, Wufei?"
"You think I would let an injustice such as my day today slip by without punishing those directly responsible for it?"
"Whoa-oh, so we've got another teammate here, huh Heero?"
"We'll need the extra manpower. They'll be ready for us now, our future operations are going to require far more cunning and skill than we've exhibited in the past."
"I think that translates to welcome aboard."
"Justice will be served, so what's the plan?"